Making sense of platform-mediated residences in tourist destinations. A semiotic analysis of the controversy around home sharing in Barcelona

ABSTRACT

In 2021, the city of Barcelona made the controversial decision to prohibit short-term rentals of private rooms to tourists. The ban renewed the heated debate around the uses and functions of private property in the context of the contemporary tourist city, where the market of tourist accommodation has been significantly impacted by players such as Airbnb. This study aims to give an account of the controversy surrounding the ban on the short-term renting of private rooms in Barcelona by interpreting it as a reflection of the intrinsic conflicts of meanings operating in the tourist city. Accordingly, it maps and analyses the different positions voiced by the social actors involved in both the political urban arena and in the market. The main hypothesis of this work is that the controversy provoked by the decision to ban the shared homes listed by platforms such as Airbnb unmasks different ways to “make meaning of” structural issues such as urban life, housing and inequalities, tourism, digital labour and precariousness in the immediate post-pandemic scenario of the tourist city. From the epistemological point of view, the study relies on a semiotic perspective and critically analyses different textualities related to the debate around home sharing in Barcelona. These textualities articulate different themes and figures at a deeper axiological level where a clash of value systems takes place.

KEYWORDS:

• Home sharing
• sociosemiotics
• urban semiotics
• housing
• tourism
• platform economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sharing Cities Declaration: https://www.sharingcitiesaction.net/declaration/.

2 Law 5/2020, 29/04, an additional provision to Tourism Law 12/2002, establishes that “Barcelona City Council can regulate tourist accommodation activities in tourist homes and in shared homes, through municipal ordinances, which may establish particular requirements and may fix temporary limitations and maximum periods of validity of the permit to perform these activities, in accordance with the legislation in force.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by PLUS: Platform Labour in Urban Spaces project [grant number 822638] and The Barcelona UOC Chair in Digital Economy: for a Platform Economy focusedon the people's welfare and the right to the city (Open_Chair).

Notes on contributors

Elsa Soro

Elsa Soro is PhD in Science of Language and Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is currently a Faculty member at the Barcelona Tourism Hospitality and Gastronomy School of the University of Barcelona (CETT_UB). After her Phd, she has combined professional activities as a consultant for private foundations and public bodies related to Tourism and Cultural Industries with lecturing in Semiotics, Tourism and Marketing at different private and public universities. She is former post-doc researcher at the University of Turin within the ERC project FACETS (Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elsa-soro/).

Ricard Espelt

Ricard Espelt is PhD in Information Society and Knowledge and Dimmons Research Group coordinator at IN3-UOC. He has been the coordinator of the Platform Labor in Urban Spaces project at the UOC. His training, professional career and publications have an interdisciplinary research-action character and are located at the crossroads between culture, research and socio-economic transformation. Among others, he is a member of the international research networks Platform Work Inclusion Living Lab (Cost Action) and the Community Economies Research Network.

Mayo Fuster Morell

Mayo Fuster Morell is the lead researcher of Dimmons Research Group of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), and the director of the Barcelona UOC Chair in digital economy, gathering the UOC, the Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa. In addition, she is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society – Harvard University. She is the Chair of COST Action P-WILL on feminist intersectional approaches to platform economy. She is the UOC's lead researcher of the National program project “Gender Digital project on gender equality in the digital sphere.” In 2010, she concluded her PhD thesis at the European University Institute in Florence on the governance of common-based peer production.